Minecraft players build touching tribute to server owner who died of cancer

Minecraft players have turned the hub area of a once-popular server into a tribute to the server's founder, who recently lost his battle with cancer.

Players have left tribute signs all over the hub of the Emenbee Minecraft server to Bryan, known in-game as Pendar2, who started the server back in 2011. At its peak, Emenbee contained 10 separate servers and had more than 1,500 concurrent players. More than one million players logged on during its lifespan. Pendar2 shut most of the server down—save for the hub—in October of last year.

"You built bonds that will last a lifetime, and there's no way to repay or express...how much you've done for us," reads one tribute at the hub. "Your server gave me memories I won't forget...rest in peace," says another. The image above was posted on Reddit by user remydesp.

In a post on the official Emenbee website, friend Mod_masta paid their own tribute to Pendar 2, who "influenced more people than most others have throughout their lifetime".

"For years, he dedicated his life to creating a Minecraft server that many of us called our home for a while. It started out as a survival server, and eventually grew to have up to over 10 different servers and 1,500 concurrent players. For the last couple years of the server's life, Bryan was not very active and many of you thought he had given up. The truth is that he was diagnosed with cancer. He endured chemo and surgery for several months, and eventually we thought he had been cured. But towards the end of last year, it unexpectedly came back. Recently, Bryan passed away," Mod_masta said.

"To me Bryan was a partner, a friend, and an amazing server owner. Working with him for several years, I learned how much of a genius he truly was, in both his knowledge that allowed Emenbee to become so popular and in how he excelled at developing with so little experience. Our time spent together on Emenbee together were some of the best years of my life. It was truly an honor to have a friend like him. He did so much more for the server than most players thought he did. I could not have done anything without him.

"Without Bryan there would never have been an Emenbee, and so many of us would have been deprived of so many fun and exciting experiences. Bryan will be remembered as a genius, a compassionate person, and our hero."

Thanks, Eurogamer.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.